Happy Thanksgiving [HRE}

Celebrated thanksgiving Catanach style- lots of food and football.  Since we don't like turkey we cooked up fillet mignon, twice baked potatoes, and stuffing.  The morning was spent working on my poster for the ConBio meeting next week on my Swaziland work.  Hard to believe in less than a week we'll be landing in Auckland.  I'm so glad I've talked my parents into coming.  My dad hasn't been on a real vacation since I was in 2nd grade, so he's more than due up for one.

One tradition was postponed to a few days after Thanksgiving.  My dad and I make a lemon pie every major holiday.  It's an old Catanach family recipe, so famous it's now found on the side of the Jello brand Cook and Serve Jello boxes.  My mom doesn't understand since it doesn't involve real lemons, but she humorous us.  This year for various reasons we weren't able to make it on Thursday, so we made it today.  It turned out good (as always, well except for the year I forgot to add the Jello mix...), especially with a homemade pie crust my sister made.  Its too bad she had to go back home already and didn't get to partake in pie.

I also decided to build a bigger pheasant cage.  I always forget pheasants are escape artists (Eddie compared them to rats, and it really is pretty accurate), luckily I had them in the garage.  But trying to catch a flock of birds flying around the garage isn't super fun.  After 2 hours without success building an escape proof cage I decided to leave them in the transport box another night and get some more appropriately sized wire since the big stuff didn't contain them and they kept getting their heads stuck in the small stuff.  The next day my mom and I spent another couple hours working on it, and after strapping a screen door to the top of the cage it was finally escape proof.  In the process we had to chase a couple pheasants so my mom got to experience the explosive power of these birds.  By the time we were done I was thinking we should just eat the pheasants. 

Football will not be mentioned.  Only one game turned out as I had hoped- Roll Tide [HRE].